11/12/2016

Headline November 13, 2016/ ''' *CLOUD* CONCERT '''

''' *CLOUD* CONCERT '''

''WHEN MY HAIR GETS LONG, -I kind of look like him,'' MateiZaharia jokingly evades the question, about what he thinks of being compared to Bill Gates.

But the thirty year old Romanian-Canadian computer scientist is indeed reminiscent of Microsoft's former boss in his early days:

*He is considered one of the most brilliant geeks of his generation*

He has developed an exciting new technology, called Spark, to crunch data; and he is one of the founders of a promising startup, Databricks.

Yet in an important way the two men are different : *Mr.Zaharia has no interest in making billions*.

After spending two years helping get Databricks off the ground, he has recently reduced his involvement with the firm and become a-

*Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology*.

''I like to work on long-term and risky projects -something you can do at the university, but not at startups,'' he explains.

This combination -progress without profits -makes Mr. Zaharia a poster-child for a branch of IT industry that is crucial to many websites and apps, but gets much less attention than the latest smartphone or the next social-media sensation.

Databricks, and a bunch of other startups, provided software that makes data centres run more efficiently and lets them handle vast amounts of data.

The operators of the biggest data-centres, such as, say, Amazon or facebook, already have this sort of software installed. But the next stage, which the startups are concentrating on, is to make it sufficiently user-friendly for non-tech businesses.

The sector is improving rapidly, but may never make anyone filthy rich -even those who are keener than Mr. Zaharia on money.

The model for this sort of software is *virtualisation*, the idea of splitting a computer into several ''virtual machines'', each with its own operating system and programs.

Originally developed for mainframe computers, virtualisation became popular in the late 2000s as a way of making corporate data centres more efficient by spreading the work around servers that were being under-used.

The company that pioneered this, VMware, has grown rapidly.

A startup called Docker is now seeking the same sort of success ''containerisation''.

It slices big and complex online applications into more manageable parts, which can be handled separately, meaning the small teams of programmers can focus on improving the code in one container.

Upgrades can be installed at any time without the need to wait until a new version of the entire application is ready.

Since containers make developers much more productive, Docker's software has proved hugely popular.

The firm claims that there have been more than 800 million downloads since the program was first released in 2013.

Some of Dockers customers have already made it an important part of their software supply chain.